Western US Wildfires Undo Two Decades of Air Quality Progress

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: Increasingly intensive and frequent wildfires in the western U.S. are deteriorating air quality and causing more premature deaths, a new study found. Fires have damaged federal efforts from the Environmental Protection Agency to improve air quality mainly through reductions in automobile emissions, per the study published Monday in The Lancet Planetary Health. From 2000 to 2020, air quality has worsened in the western U.S. due to wildfires. Black carbon concentrations have risen 55% on an annual basis, mostly due to the wildfires, researchers found. The fires have also caused an increase of 670 premature deaths per year in the region in the two-decade span. Meanwhile, the eastern U.S. had no major declines in air quality during the same time period.

Our air is supposed to be cleaner and cleaner due mostly to EPA regulations on emissions, but the fires have limited or erased these air-quality gains,' said Jun Wang, the study's lead corresponding author and chair of the University of Iowa's Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, in a statement. '[A]ll the efforts for the past 20 years by the EPA to make our air cleaner basically have been lost in fire-prone areas and downwind regions,' Wang added. 'We are losing ground.'

[Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA] said the findings were consistent with other studies that contribute to the same overall picture that after the air quality regulations' great success, 'the extremes of those air pollution episodes are actually now increasing again' due to wildfires. 'On average, the air quality is still better, but the problem is, it's during these episodes of just-near apocalyptic conditions where we're really losing a lot of ground and that really is because the size and the intensity of wildfires has increased greatly,' he said. Given climate change is a wildfire driver, keeping global heating to the lowest level possible will help. 'But we're still going to see more warming no matter what moving forward, and so there will be further increases in the wildfire hazard,' Swain said.

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